First published 2023
The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts operates in complete secrecy. Its students don't study literature or history. They master the techniques of murder. Each pupil arrives with a target who deserves to die and an ethical justification for the killing. The campus location remains hidden even from those who attend classes there. Students practice on each other as potential victims while professors teach the finer points of poison, timing, and alibis. The curriculum demands one final project: execute the perfect murder of your chosen victim and escape all consequences. Success means a better world with one fewer terrible person in it. Failure means exposure, capture, or death. The Conservatory's graduates change the world one carefully planned killing at a time. But learning to commit the perfect crime requires surviving classmates who see you as practice, instructors who test your skills without warning, and a system designed to eliminate the unworthy. Students who thought they understood murder discover the gap between wanting someone dead and actually killing them.
Genres: mystery, crime, thriller, academia, dark-academia
Vibes: dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
400 pages · Hardcover · Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: murder, violence